At its most basic, mead is made of three ingredients: Honey, yeast, and water.  This mead is often referred to as traditional mead, and some purists contend that the other brews that include fruits or spices aren’t “true” meads.

The basic traditional mead can be a dry mead, which in terminoogy similar to wine is a less sweet mead in which more of the sugars have fermented away. There is also sack mead, which is a sweeter mead than the dry form and contains more sugar after fermentation than the dry does. The main difference here between these two is the amount of honey used. A dry mead may use approximately 2.5 pounds of honey per gallon and a sack mead will use approximately 4 pounds of honey per gallon.

Melomel is a style of mead made with fruit for an additional flavoring. A couple subcategories of melomels are pyment which is a melomel made with grape juice and cyser which is a melomel made with apples or apple juice.

Metheglin is a style of mead that has been infused with spices and herbs usually during the fermentation process. The ingredients here can be as mild or as wild as the imagination. You will see metheglins with cinnamon, ginger, and all manner of spices. Also, metheglins run the range in pepper usage, as recipes are available for everything from the mild to the super hot.

A hippocras is a mead that is a little of both melomel and metheglin. It is a pyment that has had spices added to it.

Those are the basic types of mead, all of which are relatively easy to make at home.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 at 5:19 am and is filed under General Mead Making, How to Make Mead. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.